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Actually, lower taxes specifically on fossil fuels would be very helpful, because government’s large net incomes on these fuels motivate it to see climate deniers as a more equal set of citizens than the rest of us.

Hansen, of the Kharecha and Hansen duo that last year published a “Prevented Mortality” paper in Environmental Science and Technology, has proposed a “Fee and Dividend” deal where government’s fossil fuel income would all be given to the citizens in equal dividends.

Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to understand that this income is already very large, and a proposal to divide it back out to the people would do well at election time; he proposes an added Fee, which would not.

I don’t know if laser blasting of eyes — “radial keratotomy” — is any good. I’m sticking with corrective lenses. But suppose lasers were the bees’ knees, or the knees of just one bee, whichever is better. Eyeglass-revenue-funded librarians would then hate and fear laser eye surgeons.

So would all paid public servants if the loss of tax revenue, when the surgeons zap their lasers, were not — as it typically would not be — limited to the particular sector the cancelled tax supposedly had been supporting.

A little closer to topic now: should road building and maintenance be funded by taxes on motor fuels derived from petroleum and natural gas? Publically funded road builders and maintainers would then hate and fear developers of alternative car propulsion methods, unless those methods were obviously meant to be ineffective. Recall the Bush hydrogen-car initiative.

Without the huge subsidies from motor fuel users to government, we might not have had that boondoggle, and elected representatives might not now be so eager to slip a little of the take to the tradesmen who make it possible.

It is a little, right? The talk is of billions, but over a period of five or ten years, in which time those tradesmen facilitate the collection of half a trillion or a full trillion.

Bolling is decrying government’s failure to bind the mouths of the kine that tread the taxpayers.